OTHER CONTOURS

Most of my photographs are not necessarily discreet works, but rather glimmers into a fissured introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror.

VESSEL PORTRAITS

2003-ongoing

This is a series of photographs of people holding vessels. I ask that they choose the vessel. I do not ask them to hold the vessel in any particular way; I wonder how they will relate to the object, how they will hold the vessel that also holds.

TORN MAP HOUSE

Spring 2011

Torn map house was a week-long installation and transaction that attempted to invert the conventional relationship between audience and site, between my work and site, between myself and site. Both as a fleeting shelter and a studio, the gallery space offered opportunities for public transactions: a tea house, an invitation to draw an onion and place it in a suitcase, the occasion to bring a vessel of some kind and have your portrait taken while holding it, to barter for art, materials, food and books (a take it or leave it system), and to view and take part in performance: sawing the bed in half, wrapping myself in a cocoon of rope and painting my suitcases with wax.

Throughout the week, I made an effort to be as present in the gallery as possible: burning incense, playing music, drawing my share of onions on a slate tablet, eating and sharing food, reading and writing while seated on a mat on the floor; I practiced yoga, changed my clothing, and placed the peels and casings of clementines and edamame on the window ledge. One of my favorite moments of this show was when a landscape architect came by and adorned the arc of a kiln shelf with lettuce from her lunch in exchange for a necklace I had made from rusted compression stems and copper cable.

BROKEN LYRIC

2009-ongoing

The work varies from installation to discreet drawings/textiles (a burned sweater, an unburied mattress). These methods are paths—interlaced, agitated and supportive; toward a cross-pollination of material studies and investigations into inventory, possession, sampling, and finally a questioning of nostalgia and longing, as the majority of the pieces in this archive were given away, dismantled or re-purposed into new works.

SOME QUIET ADVICE

Spring 2010

"Some Quiet Advice" was an international exhibition of seventy photographs. These images were selected from an online archive of photographs that I have been digitally curating for the past five years.

The exhibition took place in the less than hospitable climate of a rural green house. The vision for the show was a body of photographs that swayed between personal and collective memory—that meditated on ideas of temporal distance, physical displacement, and the borderlands between stable citations and fading landscapes.

Discomforted by a series of recent critiques that my work relied on a nostalgic posture, I turned to Svetlana Boym, who, in her text, The Future of Nostalgia, suggests that the modern nostalgic is both homesick and sick of home. The photographs were organized in categories of Boym's design, reflective and restorative nostalgia.

Reflective nostalgia relies on the patina of memory which "has always been encoded through a trace, a detail, a suggestive synecdoche.” Whereas restorative nostalgia seems to compensate distance by the availability of a desired object or situation, Boym articulates: ". . . displacement is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one. Never mind if it's not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have already forgotten the difference.”

In choosing the site of the greenhouse I hoped to discover new rhythms for viewing. By the use of the plastic bags that were weighted by sand and stone, I was interested in questioning the fragility of the photograph without compromising its integrity and also in using a “framing” that was less reverential or precious.

These artists who participated in this show were strangers to me and yet, through the donations of their photographs to this collection, they proposed a kind of relational aesthetic that temporarily assuaged the placelessness of the internet.

LATER DESTINY

2010-ongoing

LATER DESTINY is a collection of photographs that regard fragmentation of experience and place; a way to misstep a convergence of meaning, also a way to work and remember. This does not necessarily imply fragmentation as damage, as taking apart an idealized whole, but rather: fragmentation as traces, dispersions, "dusts of [quotidian] events."

There is, after all, a layer of rock called parting in which rock may tend to split or break readily along bedding planes, or in sedimentary or stratified rocks, the division planes that separate the individual layers, beds or strata: formation isolation.

DILUTIONS

Spring 2011

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

-Roland Barthes

This public project involved the physical dissipation of thirty-four love letters that were placed in transparent bags filled with creek water and tied along the chipped green railing of a canal. It was both lovely and strange to watch the words that used to both “seduce and wound me," dissolve, sometimes lifting in ribbons of ink, so calmly. After one week, and after witnessing many interactions with people attempting to read the letters and imagine a narrative, I walked down the canal in the dark, stabbing each bag with a pin— the letters were no longer so potent, the mourning was over.